electricity

This post was co-authored with Jamshyd Godrej, chairman of Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd and a WRI Board Member. It originally appeared in The Economic Times.

Ministers are gathering in New Delhi today to address an urgent challenge: how to unlock the full potential of clean energy to drive economic growth, expand energy access, and protect the climate. The 4th Clean Energy Ministerial — which brings together energy ministers and other delegates from more than 20 leading economies — is a critical opportunity to inject new life into the global clean energy transition.

While we’ve seen progress on renewable energy, the sector still faces barriers to increase financial support and create strong national policies that will enable it to flourish. First, some good news: The renewable energy market has blossomed in recent years. In just the last decade, global clean energy investment has increased five-fold, from $50 billion a year to more than $250 billion. And more than 100 countries have renewable energy targets in place.

India has set itself on a remarkable journey by ushering in renewable energy growth. The National Action Plan on Climate Change, launched in 2008, aims to have 15 percent of India’s electricity consumption from renewable energy by 2020. Currently, the country produces slightly more than 12 percent of its energy from renewables, putting it on track for that goal. India has been using various policy levers to advance renewable energy, including tax and generation-based incentives, capital subsidies, and feed-in tariffs. The Renewable Portfolio Obligations is also providing support for renewable energy developers. Even so, the country is not yet achieving its full potential — which is critical for the 400 million people who lack access to basic electricity.

This post was co-written with Sarah Martin, an intern with WRI’s Electricity Governance Initiative.

The theme of today’s Blog Action Day is the “Power of We,” a celebration of people working together to make a positive difference in the world. The idea of partnership is at the core of WRI’s Electricity Governance Initiative (EGI), a network of civil society organizations dedicated to promoting transparent, inclusive, and accountable decision-making in the electricity sector. In honor of Blog Action Day, this post outlines some of EGI’s most recent work towards finding new responses to the emerging energy “Trilemma.”

The energy “Trilemma” is a newly developed concept outlining the main hurdles to achieving universal access to clean, reliable, and affordable energy. The Trilemma involves three interrelated challenges: meeting the growing demand for clean, affordable, and reliable electricity; ensuring economic growth and energy security; and developing a low-carbon growth strategy.

WRI’s Electricity Governance Initiative (EGI) is a network of more than 30 organizations from 10 countries dedicated to promoting transparent, inclusive, and accountable decision-making in the electricity sector. EGI recently held its annual retreat, where partners representing 10 countries discussed how good governance and collaboration can help tackle the energy Trilemma.

India recently experienced one of the world’s worst blackouts, with 670 million citizens directly impacted. While media reports have focused on the repercussions from two days of outages, this incident illustrates a much larger, more systemic problem: the need for improved electricity governance.

India’s History of Power Problems

India has the world’s fifth-largest electrical system, with an installed electric capacity of about 206 gigawatts (GW). India initiated power sector reforms in the early 1990s through a range of legal, policy, and regulatory changes. Over the last two decades, some of these reforms have been impressive, but several others weren’t taken. This lack of follow-through has resulted in a growing gap between electricity demand and supply throughout the country. Recent blackouts may have shined a spotlight on this gap, but it’s a situation that’s widespread in India: Not only do 400 million Indians lack access to electricity, but electricity supply is unreliable and of poor quality even in large parts of “electrified” India. In addition to the existing demand, Indian consumers, businesses, and industries seek more electricity to power appliances, processes, and products, further exacerbating the demand-supply gap. By 2035, India’s power demand is expected to more than double.

In looking at the recent blackouts and India’s power supply situation in general, three major governance issues jump out:

Sarah Martin and Gayatri Gadag also contributed to this blog post.

Rio+20 may have ended more than three weeks ago, but the environmental and development communities are still feeling the disappointment. One of the biggest shortcomings was the lack of collaboration between citizen groups (the “grassroots”) and the policy research organizations that influence policymakers (the “grasstops”).

As WRI’s Manish Bapna points out, “A gap and lack of coordination between grassroots and grasstops institutions was evident during the Rio+20 summit. Advancing sustainable development in a meaningful way hinges on bridging this gap.” In other words, creating political will and building the constituency necessary to support the policy changes being advocated for requires collaboration between different segments of civil society.

Expanding Clean Energy Access

Bridging the grassroots-grasstops divide is especially necessary when it comes to clean energy access, an issue that received much attention at Rio+20 as a result of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s Sustainable Energy for All (SE4A) initiative. SE4A is a global initiative that aims to mobilize action from all sectors of society to support universal access to modern energy services, improve energy efficiency, and increase the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. However, actually expanding clean energy access will require cooperation between think tanks, institutions, governments, and the citizens who are most in need of sustainable energy access.